Milja's Mobile Musings

This week, the first ‘Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise’ conference (also known as CITE) was held in San Francisco. The event brought together hundreds of IT execs and companies who share an interest in exploring how consumer technology is relevant in the enterprise. The week was earth shattering in a few ways, not the least of which was experiencing my first earthquake. Perhaps the 4.0 magnitude quake that jolted me awake Monday morning and made my hotel room sway back and forth was an indication of things to come. It certainly gave me an interesting analogy to share in my speaking session at the event – specifically how mobile and social are driving how the news of the quake was shared throughout the city. While the quake was an interesting start to the event, the CITE conference itself provided an impressive lineup of fantastic sessions and speakers. Here, I’ll share a few key takeaways on how personal technology is changing and infusing the workplace.

1. We are at the beginning of an incredible journey. The pace of change is this market is truly incredible and the adoption by enterprises is set to take off. In his session, Rick Bauer of CompTia stated that “The CIO and the organization face not only the consumerization of IT (CoIT), but also the increasing velocity of technology diffusion into the enterprise.” While we have to be sure not to get too caught up in every technology wave, we need to embrace the technology that users want, and don’t let it get away from us. This journey is one that no leading company can afford to miss.
2. Today’s technology is causing relationships to change. The connections that exist between IT and other lines of business including sales and marketing are morphing in a positive way. For example, one conference session featured both the CIO and CMO of a major insurance company, discussing how their departments work together in today’s CoIT-inspired environment. The CIO had a fantastic observation that “IT has to have enough insight to make a difference – and the relevance & credibility with the business to make a difference”. His observation as a CIO was that as he is approached for a technology request, “there are fewer times that a gap is a chasm when we are talking to LOBs about their technology needs.” Consumerization has driven users and lines of business to be better educated on what is possible and has made them more willing to work in concert with IT to meet their needs.
3. Apps are a significant priority. I’ve been talking about the importance of mobile applications in almost every blog I write, and the conference focus was right in line with this core belief. Just before the show opened I heard that Apple announced that the 25 billionth app was sold over the weekend. The economics of that are staggering! When was the last time anyone had sold 25 billion of anything? At the CITE conference, the apps discussion was around building great apps. I really enjoyed sessions by Brian Katz of Sanofi. His buzzword is that we need to avoid building “Crapplications.” Our focus should be on building apps that meet the needs of users and take a ‘bottoms up’ approach when defining use cases. To do this, go for a ride-along with your technicians, sit for a day with your users and observe how they interact with data before you decide what to build into the app. Design is key – but overdesigning and putting too many features into an app can be a major downfall.
4. Data is independent of devices. We’ve come a long way in the mobile world; if you look at the number of vendors who claim to manage some aspect of your mobile world (I’ve heard that today there are anywhere from 40-70 vendors) they will all tell you a slightly different story of how to do it. Soon, we will live in a world where information moves based on what device or system you are using. Consumerization has changed the model: BYOD (bring your own device) and COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled) combined represent what CoIT means. This forces us to rethink how we manage mobility. We can’t simply manage a mobile device; rather we have to think about management from a more holistic point of view – connectivity, security, application management and MDM are parts of a bigger, comprehensive EMM (enterprise mobility management) requirement.
5. Adoption is the new ROI. If you are trying to figure out how to quantifiably measure ROI in this new mobile world I think you’re going to have a pretty tough time. Can you quantify the value of mobile email? In fact, can you even remember a time when you didn’t have mobile email to compare to? Smartphones and tablets are significantly impacting how we do business – but exactly how significant is it? Forecasts are now stating there will be 100 million iPads sold by the end of this year. With numbers like that, perhaps we simply need to consider mobile as the new standard business tool and look at a new way to track success: adoption. If your employees and customers are engaging with you through mobile apps then perhaps you are already achieving the ROI you are looking for.
6. Think mobile first. Whether you are deploying apps to your internal employees, partners or customers, the crystal ball of the future predicts that taking a ‘Mobile First’ mentality would be a good strategy. I talked about how this concept in in use at SAP for both internal and external apps in this short video recorded at CITE. Mobile is a mindset that we are embracing wholeheartedly at SAP – it is driving how IT works internally and how we go to market with our product offerings. At CITE this topic came up several times as vendors and enterprises alike look to the future.

Overall, the CITE conference provided a broad perspective of the impact of mobile and social from industry CIOs who are embracing the technology. One of the best quotes I heard this week was in a session about what mobile consumer technologies can do for your business. Often we think about mobilizing existing business processes – but the potential new ways that this technology brings about are what is really compelling. One CIO advised “Don’t pave the cow path.” In other words, open your eyes to the potential that consumer technology can bring about to transform your business.

The Consumer Electronics Show was held in Las Vegas this week, bringing together over 100,000 techies to ogle over the latest innovations. The hilights of the show include cool new connected devices including Ultrabooks, connected vehicles, TVs you can control from your iPad and yet another new form factor from Samsung called the ‘Note’. While there is a lot of excitement around the hardware, it is the application of this consumer technology in enterprise that I find more interesting.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week with SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann, talking about our predictions for what 2012 will bring (stay tuned for more on that topic). A good portion of these predictions center around how consumer technology will impact businesses around the world. The last two years have been significant – and it’s not going to slow down. There isn’t anything new to this story, but the adoption rates of consumer technology at work are skyrocketing.

Oliver had an opportunity here at CES to talk on a panel and discuss the impact of consumer trends on the enterprise. The panel discussion opened talking about the challenges of adopting consumer devices. Most of us are both consumers and employees so we can daily relate to this – I know I have the same expectation of a good user experience both at home and at work. The challenge then for IT is to satisfy the demands of employees while managing risk and security concerns. Oliver’s perspective on consumer mobility is that it has helped SAP to drive a mobility mindset of all employees. By providing developers, sales reps, marketing, operations and others with the tablets and smartphones they want, people start to think about mobility intrinsically. According to Oliver “Employees are embracing technology, using it, getting to know it, and want to use it in their work.”

One interesting perspective discussed at this session was that in the past IT had to drive users to accept technology. Today that has flipped – employees are driving the enterprise to adopt the technology they want. And because of this – price no longer drives the sale of technology. One panelist from Verizon stated that “it is the creativity – not the utility that drives the adoption of technology.”

Every discussion I have been a part of on this topic inevitably lands on the topic of management and security. I really liked a quote from another panelist: “Data and knowledge are assets and you have to protect those assets.” Everyone agrees wholeheartedly that any device (whether corporate owned or BYOD) needs to be secured. With the speed that the mobile market is moving, Oliver’s advice was to think beyond today’s devices – the future will bring many new devices and you need a tool that will give you flexibility to grow and change over time. Securing the content on devices is becoming more and more critical – driving to mobile application management as a key trend in 2012.

When we talk about productivity, we know that mobile devices drive increased productivity. Everyone in the room (including me) agreed when one panelist observed that “You don’t watch TV anymore without an iPhone or iPad in your hands.” Business doesn’t stop at 5:00pm or even 11:00pm – it is happening all the time. My phone is the last thing I check before owing to bed and the first thing I check in the morning. I believe that companies can probably recoup their annual costs of a device in a week or two simply through productivity increases.

Oliver noted “The combination of easy access and real time corporate information is what drives consumption.” We automatically think about productivity gains being achieved by replying to email, but the real benefit for executives is instant access to checking pipeline and the status of their business in real time. According to Oliver, this is the killer app. One last observation and bit of advice: “The CEO of the future has to understand the trends in the consumer market and make decisions on how to apply them. Consumerization is a trend that is unstoppable.”

This week I had the pleasure of attending the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco. The BYOD topic has popped up in a number of sessions and is a great segue into our second blog on the BYOD invasion. Last time I talked about what companies and employees really want – and the first session today brought it home. One company speaking at this conference and embracing the BYOD invasion is Cisco. This is a great example of of the fact that BYOD isn’t just about mobile phones and tablets – it’s also about laptops (also referred to as BYOC).

Cisco has about 50,000 users and gives them the option to purchase their own laptops. With this flexibility, 10,000 of these users have Mac laptops. Tom Gillis, VP and GM Security Technology Business Unit stated that this policy has reduced costs by 25% and end user satisfaction is up 200%. So why are we happier to be spending our own money for our work laptops? Tom stated that “They (employees) are happy because they have the freedom of choice.” he recommends “Give the people what they want. Implement the infrastructure to control it. Everybody wins.”

I think these are great words to guide us in this BYOD discussion. After all, we want out employees to be happy, don’t we?The new white paper we are talking about, written by Aberdeen’s Andrew Borg, is chock full of great new statistics to support the BYOD invasion in today’s world.

The research from Aberdeen goes way back go 2008, when they started to track the use of ‘employee liable’ devices. Their early research findings showed a fundamental shift in how mobile devices were being procured, paid for, managed, and supported. Since 2008 the trend that was pretty North America dominated has only been speeding up – and globalizing.

In their July 2011 study, Aberdeen found that 75% of organizations, like Cisco, were permitting the use of employee-liable devices for business purposes. That’s a huge number, and when you break it down there are 51% of companies who stated that they were permitting any employee device to gain access to corporate network and email, and 24% indicated that they require all employee-liable devices to comply with company policy before permitting them corporate access.

The recommendation from Cisco was that you have to control BYOD. I firmly believe that in order to be successful, you can’t take this concept lightly. The 51% is a pretty scary number and a bit of a worry in my mind. I am curious if this group of companies allows access to email only or if they have strategies for deploying enterprise mobile applications as well. And if they don’t have a company policy in place then are they controlling and securing these devices.

While BYOD is compelling, we should think about it long term and be sure to look at your entire mobility strategy – not just letting devices in. We’ll be asking Andrew a lot of these questions and diving more into this research during the webcast on this topic on October 4th (it’s free, but registration is required).

In my next blog I’ll look more into the behavior of three classes of companies – Aberdeen groups them as ‘Best in Class’, ‘Industry Average’ and ‘Laggards’. Cisco is a great example of a company that is taking the BYOD invasion seriously and achieving significant benefits. I think you’ll find the statistics pretty interesting.

I am pleased to have been collaborating with Andrew Borg, research Analyst from Aberdeen Group on a new topic for the SAP Mobile Sense series. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be diving into the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon and how it can impact your mobility strategy. I’ll soon be publishing a whitepaper written by Andrew on this topic and will be hosting a live webinar on October 4th.

Over the past few years, organizations have been permitting, and even encouraging employees to bring their own mobile devices into the workplace to be used for work purposes. While it came on pretty slowly, it has been picking up steam over the last 12-18 months. And it is shifting the way in which devices are procured, paid for, managed and supported.

At first glance, the concept may appear to radically lower the cost of enterprise mobility. Two years ago the discussion was about who got a mobile device – today that is a moot point. Everyone has a mobile device. And companies can extend productivity and communications advantages to a much broader group of employees by letting them being their own devices to work. However, the BYOD concept also introduces new risks and may actually significantly increase costs of the organization if not properly managed.

Let’s start from the beginning – by look at why companies and individual are even considering BYOD. In the whitepaper written by Aberdeen for SAP, Andrew Borg states that the BYOD phenomenon has momentum because it meets the needs of both the organization and the employee.

What do organizations want? When you are asked ‘Why BYOD?’ what is the first thing that comes to mind from the POV of IT? Probably “to cut costs.” After all, you won’t have to pay for the actual piece of hardware, right? By transferring the cost of the equipment purchase to the employee, IT can certainly decrease capital expenditures. However, on the other hand it can increase the complexity of the mobile infrastructure needed to manage a network of both personally and corporate owned devices. Andrew argues that if it is done well and managed properly, success can be accomplished without a significant increase in operational budget. If it’s not done properly it could end up costing you much more.

What to employees want? We’re pretty much all employed by someone so we all have a point of view on this. What do employees really want when it comes to working on a mobile device? From my own point of view, with mobility a huge part of my life, I need to have the device I want. I hate to put a stake in the ground, but when it comes to this topic I just have to. If I am not allowed to use the device that I want I will not be a happy worker. This is just the way the world is going. Some may argue that mobility has a tendency to extend the work day and cut into personal time (I won’t deny that), but others argue that it actually gives the employee control to decide where and when they work. Andrew states that supporting a BYOD model enables the interleaving of personal and social life into the workplace as appropriate, offering a potential for a healthier work/life balance. I think we could all use a bit of that.

Where we can be successful is when we meet both the needs of the company and the needs of the employee. One company I recently met with at SAP’s TechEd user conference told me that they support the BYOD model because their employees simply demand it. They even use it in their employment recruiting efforts. “Come work for us and we’ll let you use your own device.”

I can give you lots of anecdotal facts on what companies are doing in this area, but instead, I’ll next share statistics from Aberdeen’s research on the topic. Stay tuned for the next posting where we’ll talk more.

To learn more about this topic and get the whitepaper (coming soon), visit the Mobile Sense website. Register now for the Webcast on October 4th with Andrew Borg of Aberdeen.

Ten years is a pretty long time in the world of modern technology. Today I had reason to think back to what life was like 10 years ago in 2001. I decided to look up what was going on in the tech world and found that in 2001:

• Apple introduced the iPod
• Dell become the largest PC maker
• Hewlett Packard announced plans to buy Compaq
• Wikipedia was founded
• Microsoft released the original Xbox game console
• And most importantly, Sybase Afaria was the market leading mobile device management solution

Back in 2001 enterprise mobility was a bit different too. Even though I worked for Sybase, I didn’t have a cell phone, there were no smartphones or tablets, I didn’t even carry a slim lightweight laptop. For enterprises, mobility was mostly about task workers – and mobility management was about controlling laptops.

A lot has changed over the past ten years. But one thing has remained the same – Sybase Afaria has been the mobile device management (MDM) market leader every year from 2001 through 2011. In fact, today, we announced that leading IT market research advisory firm IDC, in its recent Worldwide Mobile Device Management Enterprise 2011 – 2015 Forecast and 2010 Vendor Shares report, recognized Sybase as the leader in mobile device management (MDM) enterprise software market for the tenth consecutive year.

For well over a decade, Sybase Afaria has transformed enterprises and managed mobility partners around the world by empowering the mobile workforce. Sybase Afaria enables enterprise IT to fully manage and secure a wide range of personal and corporate smartphones and tablets, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile and more, in both hosted and behind the firewall environments. Additionally, Sybase Afaria’s seamless over-the-air (OTA) delivery of in-house and publicly available apps, combined with on-device enterprise portal technology, ensures that only approved mobile users are granted access to internal applications and data.

I encourage you to check out the press release on the IDC report, where IDC evaluated over 20 MDM vendors. You can also find a link to purchase the full IDC report here.